Real History Blog

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Sunday, July 15, 2007

Tim Weiner's "history" of the CIA

I just finished listening on C-SPAN to Tim Weiner being interviewed by David Ignatius re his new book on the CIA. Weiner is remarkably misleading about the CIA's record, especially in relation to the Kennedys. This is not surprising, however, since Weiner has been a favored reporter of the CIA's for years now.

Weiner's point he most wants to convey is that -- far from being the "rogue elephant" that Frank Church called it -- the CIA has always been ultraresponsive to Presidents. But that is provable untrue.

I'm shocked he would open with a quote from Richard Helms, and then return to him on the subject of Kennedy's assassination, given Helms' willingness to lie under oath (he was charged with perjury for denying the CIA's role in the Chilean operations).

Let's look at how "responsive" the CIA has been to the president over the years:

Truman wanted an information agency. The CIA essentially blackmailed itself into existence (see CIA officer Miles Copeland's veiled account of this in his book "The Real CIA.") So right off the bat, the CIA was doing something Truman didn't want. After Kennedy's assassination, Truman wrote a letter that was published in the Washington Post, in which he stated:

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue-and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda ... the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people. ...

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field-and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

The CIA was clearly not created to serve only the President. It was created to serve the interests of Wall Street, and if you follow their pattern of covert action around the globe, you'll see who benefitted. The Guatemalan coup in 1954 benefitted the United Fruit Company. The Iranian coup in the early fifties benefitted the oil barons (access to oil was listed as the first explicit goal of the coup in the summary of that operation.) The CIA was created from the OSS, itself a creation not of the government so much as of Wall Street. The top officers all came from children of lawyers, bankers, and other money men. The OSS's nickname was "Oh So Social" due to its high profile roster.

The CIA has often run an agenda counter to what the president wished. This is easy to document in the Kennedy administration - they were at odds at nearly every turn. But it wasn't only the Kennedy adminstration that had difficulty with the CIA.

Under the Eisenhower administration, for example, Eisenhower was set to meet with Khrushchev to discuss a mutual reduction in arms. The CIA didn't want to see any such accommodation. So in express defiance of Eisenhower's request that no such flights be made, the CIA flew the U2 over the Soviet Union. As the "official" story goes, the Soviets shot it down. As people close to those events have said in print and elsewhere, there's good evidence that the flight was deliberately sabotaged by the CIA so that it would crash over the Soviet Union, preventing a peace treaty. Even CIA director Allen Dulles stated the plane was not shot down. As Dulles testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 31, 1960:

"We believe that it was not shot down at its operating altitude of around 70,000 feet by the Russians. We believe that it was initially forced down to a much lower altitude by some as yet undetermined mechanical malfunction." ? "It is obvious to us that the plane was not hit. If the plane had been hit by a ground-to-air missile, in our belief, it would have disintegrated."

While Eisenhower later claimed responsibility for the overflight, the evidence is strong that he was surprised, and upset, that the CIA would risk upsetting the all-important peace conference. I believe that incident is part of the reason Eisenhower gave us that famous warning as he prepared to leave office:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

(Looks like we failed that call.)

I'm especially upset to hear Weiner repeat the old canard that RFK ordered the killing of Castro. RFK did NOT order the CIA to kill Castro. EVER. There is NO such tape. NO such testimony. The closest you get are comments made NOT under oath by Richard Helms, which he refused to confirm when finally skewered on this point UNDER oath. Helms had his deputy, Sam Halpern, run around and tell people this was so, even though Helms knew this to be false. It's not clear if Halpern knew this to be false, it's only clear (now, with released records and additional comments from all the intimates of RFK still alive) that RFK would never have approved any murder plot. As RFK said to Dick Goodwin, he's the guy who tried to SAVE Castro.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA's Bill Harvey sent 10 commando teams into Cuba with the goal of killing Castro. When RFK found out, he was as furious as anyone had ever seen him. He demanded Harvey stop and Harvey said he couldn't call the teams back. RFK gave Harvey "five minutes" to explain what the hell he was thinking, doing this. Harvey tried to blame it on the Pentagon but RFK had already received believable assurances from the Pentagon that that was baloney. Five minutes later, with Harvey still talking, RFK walked. RFK then demanded the CIA fire Harvey. The ever compliant (not) CIA instead transferred Harvey to Rome to hide him from RFK, but Harvey returned stateside in 1963.

In fact, the accusation of RFK's role in the Castro plots never even surfaced until the right wing and the CIA were both suffering severe scrutiny in the wake of the Watergate episode. The right wingers in the CIA wanted to use the occasion to smear Democrats as well, in the hopes of deterring a deeper investigation and possibly with the additional goal of deterring people from caring about who killed JFK and why.

Meanwhile, however, a document written by the CIA's own Inspector General, not released until LONG after the Church and Pike committee investigations had already disappeared into history, asked and answered this question explicitly, asking, can the CIA claim it had executive authority for these plots, and answering its own question, "Not in this case":

Can CIA state or imply that it was merely an instrument of policy?

Not in this case. While it is true that Phase Two was carried out in an atmosphere of intense Kennedy administration1 pressure to do something about Castro,2 such is not true of the earlier phase. Phase One was initiated in August 1960 under the Eisenhower adminstration. Phase Two is associated in [Bill] Harvey's mind with the Executive Action Capability [assassination capability], which reportedly was developed in response to White House urgings. Again, Phase One had been started and abandoned months before the Executive Action Capability appeared on the scene.

When Robert Kennedy was briefed on Phase One in May 1962, he strongly admonished Houston and Edwards to check with the Attorney General in advance of any future intended use of U.S. criminal elements. This was not done with respect to Phase Two, which was already well under way at the time Kennedy was briefed.3 [Emphasis added.]

I added three notes to clarify:

1. The "Kennedy administration" does not mean the Kennedy's. See Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett's excellent book "Thy Will Be Done" and their chapter on the "Rockefeller Administration." The Kennedys knew political operatives, but ended up relying on so many men from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund that his administration could more appriately called "the Rockefeller administration." Indeed, David Talbot shows in his recent book "Brothers" just how isolated the Kennedys became during their term, at war with nearly everyone at a high level in their administration. The Kennedys did not want a Pax Americana. The Rockefeller people did. There were several in Kennedy's administration who wanted Castro dead. But JFK and RFK were not among them.

2. There was indeed intense pressure to "do something" about Castro. But Kennedy intimates have made clear, as does the available record from credible sources, that the Kennedys wanted to foment a domestic revolution inside Cuba. They did not want to kill Castro. And every time the CIA pressured them to do exactly that (at the Bay of Pigs, and again during the Cuban missile crisis), the Kennedy's resisted that pressure.

3. The CIA states that they briefed Kennedy on the Phase One plots, but not the Phase Two plots. The wording is obtuse, but that is what they just said, right there in their own report. And they did not tell RFK they were using Mob people in the Phase Two plots either, despite RFK's explicit request to be informed if the very people he had spent years trying to prosecute were suddenly going to get federal protection. Other sources make clear that Kennedy was reportedly livid at the discovery not just at the use of the Mob, but at the revelation that the CIA was trying to kill Castro.

Weiner makes a big deal of a CIA's agents secret meeting with Rolando Cubela (not named by Weiner but it's obviously him) and noted that the agent, Des Fitzgerald went to Cubela and SAID he was an emissary of Robert Kennedy.

What Weiner doesn't tell you is that Helms had TOLD Fitzgerald to say that, even though Helms ALSO told Fitzgerald that RFK did not know. Helms told Fitzgerald not to talk to RFK about this, but to simply invoke his name with Cubela. That's on the record, a record Weiner does not mention, even though that shows up in nearly all accounts of this meeting so he could hardly be ignorant of that.

Here are two examples of the CIA's not following Kennedy's orders that are not in Talbot's book. In either 1962 or 1963 (I'm too lazy to go dig the article from my files), the CIA undertook to taint a large shipment of sugar leaving Cuba for the Soviet Union. Kennedy found out and went right to the press with it. Can you imagine the CIA's fury at having been exposed by their own president? And can you imagine Kennedy's fury, after the Bay of Pigs, to find the CIA was still willing to run its own operations without consulting him?

Another incident I learned about while browsing the Watergate hearings evidence, Volume 10. There's a transcript of a secret conversation between Lucien Conein, longtime CIA agent who helped start the DIA (Kennedy's replacement agency for the CIA, sadly staffed by the very people he would have wanted to stop if he knew who they were.) Hunt and Conein are discussing how Lodge, in Vietnam, was pushing for Diem's assassination, and Robert Kennedy kept trying to stop the plot. They were laughing about how ineffective RFK was and how Lodge managed to get around him and give the plot a green light. I'd bet good money Weiner never read that interesting conversation, and doubt he'd have put it in his book even if he had.

[CORRECTION: The conversation is in vol. 9, not 10, and Conein was in the DEA, which was created by Nixon, not the DIA, which was created by Kennedy. And they are not recorded as laughing, but there's a certain levity to the conversation, as I read it.]

I can't believe Weiner's near worship of Helms. People love to paint Helms as a solid bureaucrat, one of the "prudent professionals" as Stewart Alsop so lovingly called Helms, Angleton, and other right-wing nuts in the CIA. But this is the guy who, as a spy working under cover of UPI at the time, stole into Hitler's personal quarters and took some of his stationary. He even wrote his son a letter on Hitler's letterhead in later years, so enamored was he of his prize.

I've read every major history of the CIA to date. So far, it sounds like Weiner is just digging in the same trench. I have no intention of adding yet another book saying the same things to my collection. I have enough disinformation on my shelves already.

How I long to see a serious author do an honest history of the CIA. But then, it's likely no major house would publish it. The Church and Pike committees found that the CIA controlled people at major publishing houses. Their inside people alerted them to books that might be harmful to the CIA, and got such books killed. James Angleton's secretary used to be married to one of the big editors at Random House, Bob Loomis.

When the Bill Turner/Jonn Christian book on the RFK case snuck through, Random House, threatened with a lawsuit by a guy who may well have been connected to the CIA, recalled and burned the book. That's our world.

That's why I have to keep writing. SOMEONE who knows the truth has to stand up and tell it, since the shills get nearly all the airtime. I don't know if Weiner is a shill or just someone who has fallen in love with his subject. I just know, from hearing him, that his representation is not an honest account of the full record of the CIA's history. The REAL history of the CIA is far more interesting, and indeed, far more heartbreaking.

HR 811 vs. Paperless elections

No matter what arguments they make, the reality is, those who oppose Rush Holt's bill are pretty much guaranteeing us paperless elections in the future.

Haven't we learned enough from 2000 and 2004 how votes can be stolen? Shouldn't we all be pushing for that, no matter what other criticisms we may have of the bill?

One of the big sticking points for voting activists who oppose HR 811 is that it allows the continuation of DREs, direct recording electronic machines which tally the voter's record in the unit on which the voter marks his or her ballot.

Mark over at Mark-MyWords.blogspot.com summarizes this point neatly:

It's unfortunate for the cause of quality democracy in America that some think a DRE ban is feasible within the next decade to come without the hard evidence of unreliable and unsecure DREs that HR-811 would provide. They display a stunning lack of awareness of how any legislation is created, forged and passed in this country.

A DRE ban from our influence-drenched US Congress is simply not feasible without widespread, hard auditing evidence that the press and public couldn't ignore. That's exactly what we would have with a VVPAT. That's why Holt's HR-811 is savvy and effective.

Holt, like Kucinich, would love to see DREs go away. Rush, however, realizes that the light of universal auditing is the very best way to get there. Is his bill being pummeled by special interests in House Administration Committee sessions? Of couse it is. He's keeping his 'eye on the prize', however, and the Light of Auditing in HR-811 still stands. The bill deserves our support.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

My evil imposter is suggesting "I" am suicidal. I'm NOT.

As many of you know, I've had an imposter on the Internet for years. He's very active in alt.celebrity.gossip, a usenet discussion list. Normally he's just annoying as hell. But this post REALLY crosses a serious line.

Hey - I've said to many of you I've been depressed at times - but I'm not THIS depressed. I am NOT suicidal.

Does anyone have ideas for how to put a permanent stop to this? The company who owns that domain assures me that account is defunct. Either they are lying, or this guy has forged his trail online. (I have reason to believe it's a guy. Some believe this is David Henschel, who used to obsess over me in an internet newsgroup years ago when I discussed the Kennedy assassination.) Whoever it is, this is NOT me, and this person should rot in hell forever.

My name is Lisa Pease. I am so clinically depressed right now -- all that matters in my life is happening right now -- that I can't get out of this chair that's in front of my Internet.

Is it your Internet, too ? If so, please help me ! I am entertaining the thought that other people and I will be much better off when I am deceased.

Recent hard luck excuses for suicide:

# 1 Too few people are visiting my web site where I try to expose the conspiracy that's working against the Kennedy Family.

www.realhistoryarchives.com

# 2 My boyfriend, a recent loser on "Dancing With The Stars," dumped me a few days after his "loss." His lost bid for fame, that is. He acts like he never had anything going with me in the first place. Maybe some lucky girl can replace me in this male chauvinist pig's bed in the Hollywood Hills. Here is his unlisted land line number: (818) 828 - 4040

If you would rather E-mail me with contact information for a Suicide Hot Line, then you have to ignore the E-mail address with which I set up this Google account five years ago. It expired. Isn't that sad ? You can E-mail me here, instead:

lpease@

gte.net

Please remember my name, Irene Cara. It is Lisa Pease.

Oh, God. I am an atheist, but I say, "Oh, God" because there is nobody else for me to turn to. The few people with whom I HAVE HAD contact would be better off without me. My family doesn't care about me. Mom is a Bush - supporting prude wearing sensible shoes who always tells me, "Cross your legs !"

Boyfriend who dumped me is named Ian. Pronounced EYE - un.

As I reiterate, NONE of that is true. Absolutely bizarre. If something happens to me I absolutely did NOT kill myself. I promise.

It's important to understand that conservation is the single biggest tool we have. No "alternative technologies" do nearly as much for the environment as "spending" less. That means using less energy. Less water. Creating less garbage.

Here are some of the things I'm doing:

- Changing all my lightbulbs to compact fluorescents. Did you know not only does this save tremendously on energy usage, but it can save you money as well? (Source)

- Taking the bus. And not just to work. I started doing this after watching Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" because it's such a simple thing. Well, not entirely simple, since I live in Los Angeles, which is very widespread and not well covered by bus lines. But when I can, which is, frankly, most days of the month, I'm taking the bus to work, to the beach, to the movies, to wherever I can. And given the cost of gas, this not only benefits the environment, but it benefits my pocketbook as well! For the price of one pass I can use any of the buses in not just Los Angeles, but Santa Monica as well, and can take the metro (subway) anywhere and everywhere it goes. (This has vastly expanded my lunchtime options!)

- Bought a more fuel-efficient car. No, it wasn't the Prius I've been longing for. But it's a good, small car that gets very good gas mileage.

- Take really short showers. I used to love to relax in the shower. I have since found ways to relax that don't include wasting tons of gallons of water and the energy used to heat it.

- Don't let hotels launder my room. Meaning, when I travel, if there's an option to keep the towels rather than to have them washed overnight, I keep the towels. I don't wash them every night at home. I don't need that on the road, either.

There are many other actions I could and should be taking, and today is the much needed kick in the butt to reexamine my wasteful ways. I hope you'll take a moment to do the same.

Now, our problems will be helped by such efforts, but we need a completely different ethic on this planet if we're really going to solve our problems. War is the biggest waste of energy on the planet, on every level. End wars, end a huge drag on our planet's resources.

Happy Live Earth day. Let 7/7/07 be our lucky day, a day when the balance tips in favor of awareness and action.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Scooter Libby's Pardon and 9/11

Scooter Libby's pardon begs the question of what he would have talked about had he been truly faced with prison. Whatever it was, it was important enough for Bush to grant Libby a last-second reprieve so he wouldn't have to go to jail.

I thought back to something I had tripped upon a while ago, something that involved Libby, which happened on September 10, 2001, the day before the twin towers were struck.

On the CNN site, in a timeline available from this page, I found this stunning entry:

SEPTEMBER 10, 2001 A CIA plan to strike at al Qaeda in Afghanistan, including support for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, is given to the White House. Sen. Dianne Feinstein asks for a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney. The California Democrat is told that Cheney's staff would need six months to prepare for a meeting.

When I read this, I was stunned on two levels.

First, read that again. The CIA was going to do BEFORE 9/11 exactly what it did AFTER 9/11 - strike at al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Since we hadn't been attacked yet, 9/11 provided a nifty justification for this plan.

But second, Feinstein is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a group that works closely with intelligence agencies and--ostensibly--provides oversight of intelligence activities. (I say ostensibly because the committee does not know of, and therefore has no option to approve or disapprove all intelligence activities). How could it be that, as the 9/11 Commission report states, when the "system was blinking red" on a possible terrorist attack on the country, and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee comes to say hey, something serious is afoot and we need to talk, the VP's office could blow off Feinstein by saying they couldn't review her plans for six months?

Curious, I called Senator Feinstein's office and asked, is it normal for the VP to blow off a meeting with Senator Feinstein for six months? The four people I spoke to in her office all said and did the same thing. They said no, that's not usual, what is this about? I said this is about the Senator's 9/10 visit to Cheney, the day before 9/11. At this, each staffer got nervous and transferred me to the next person. None of them would even confirm that this conversation had transpired, but in the end, I found it on a press release on Feinstein's senate site:

I was deeply concerned as to whether our house was in order to prevent a terrorist attack. My work on the Intelligence Committee and as chair of the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee had given me a sense of foreboding for some time. I had no specific data leading to a possible attack.

In fact, I was so concerned that I contacted Vice President Cheney's office that same month to urge that he restructure our counter-terrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping through the cracks.

Despite repeated efforts by myself and staff, the White House did not address my request. I followed this up last September 2001 before the attacks and was told by 'Scooter' Libby that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material. I told him I did not believe we had six months to wait.

This just begs the question. Did Scooter Libby know what was going to happen? Did he know just how busy they really would be over the next six months due to the coming attack the next day? It's hard not to see that as a possibility.

...the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.

That quote gave rise to the notion that perhaps 9/11 was made or allowed to happen by the government as an excuse to get us back into a war. We know now that the administration tried hard to make that war one in Iraq, despite the fact that no evidence from 9/11 linked Iraq to the attack in any way. And the CIA already had plans to strike Afghanistan (as the CNN site showed) so instead we made a great show of taking down the Taliban, even as we let Osama Bin Laden slip through our fingers at Tora Bora.

We had pinpointed OBL's location by radio. We could absolutely have picked him up. Several friends of mine in the black ops world have told me repeatedly that we've known were OBL was at all times. A man in Hollywood was approached by a CIA operative to do a documentary of the secret tailing of OBL. So it's not like we can't find him.

And if we weren't picking him up, why? Could it be because ties between his actions and those of our intelligence community might raise disturbing questions about 9/11? An intelligence asset told me of a friend of his that had just come back from handing OBL a wad of cash. "For attacking us, or so he wouldn't attack us again," I asked, but got (predictably) no response.

We know now too that not only were there no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, but, as the Downing Street Memo tells us, that Team Bush knew there were no weapons, and were deliberately falsifying intelligence to justify an attack on Iraq anyway.

When Ambassador Joe Wilson tried to tell us intelligence was being falsified to justify the march to Iraq, what happened? Scooter Libby talked to Judith Miller of the New York Times about the fact that Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife, was a covert CIA operative. Six days later, Robert Novak reveals this fact in a column that essentially broke the law by revealing the identity of a covert source.

I believe that Libby's blowing off of Feinstein on the 10th should be investigated. Why did he tell her it would be six months before they could review her proposal when such a timeframe was utterly out of keeping re a request from a high profile Senator to the Vice President? I can't help but wonder if the pardon is intended, in part, to keep Libby silent on that point.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Nasser's son-in-law a double agent? Murdered?

In bizarre news today, an echo from the past, and an incident relative to the subject of a previous post, we find that the son-in-law of former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel fell to his death from a balcony. In my experience, people simply do not fall off of balconies. They are pushed. Apparently, I'm not alone in my suspicion. As the AP story today reports:

The Middle East News Agency said initial indications suggested that Mr. Marwan fell from his apartment balcony in the St. James Park neighborhood in London. MENA said Scotland Yard was investigating.

The death of Mr. Marwan, suspected of being a double agent for Israel during the 1973 war, comes amid a controversy in Egypt about his role in the intelligence and business worlds.

Some opposition lawmakers recently demanded an investigation after Egyptian papers carried reports from Israeli media about Mr. Marwan's possible role as a double agent during the 1973 war, when Egypt and Syria waged a sneak attack against Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.

If Nasser’s son-in-law was a double agent, that fits with a very interesting picture. Here are some miscellaneous bits of data:

1. In the Church Committee files, there was a report by a CIA agent who claimed that he had killed Nasser on orders of the CIA. Nasser ostensibly died a natural death, but the CIA is known to have chemicals that can induce heart attacks that are untraceable. The same agent also claimed he shot down Dag Hammarskjold’s plane. I wrote an article about Hammarskjold's death several years ago. (The same guy also claimed the CIA killed Kennedy and even gave the Church committee a map of where each team stood in Dealey Plaza. Naturally, they ignored all his data, even though he seemed quite sincere in his desire to illuminate some of the Agency's darker deeds. The CIA had set him up for a crime and had him jailed - I think he was exposing bits and pieces in the hopes that the Agency would make a deal with him.)

2. James Angleton ran the Israeli liaison activities, working closely with the Mossad, on occasion.

3. In a novel about James Angleton, “Orchids for Mother,” author Aaron Latham had the Angleton character leak news of the Yom Kippur war to Israel just prior to the Egyptian attack which the CIA was backing.

4. This allegation gains support from the 16 hour battle the Pike committee got into with the CIA over declassifying four words indicating the CIA picked up on increased security measures in the Egyptian forces. The CIA REALLY didn’t want that known, I think because it showed they knew the attack was coming and didn’t warn Israel. But if the novel is correct, as sometimes truth does appear in these contexts, that explains why Israel later honored Angleton, lauding his service to their nation. The novel also suggests that Colby knew of this, which was one of the many reasons he saw the need to purge Angleton from the CIA.

5. If Nasser’s son-in-law was a double-agent for Israel, he may well have been put in place by the CIA.

Whatever the case, I believe this was no accidental fall, and I believe the true circumstances will not be reported because they have to do with intelligence matters.